VDX Troubleshooting Course

The material available also feels very short, same as the beta material available for the CEF300 , like only the parts of the slides that were updated for the BCEFP 2015 beta were included.
When a slide says “(cont.)” but there was no previous slides on this topic, that’s a hint :)
Take the (currently free) course on Brocade’s SABA – it’s under Education on my.brocade.com. It has way more slides and info.

The NOS 4.1.1 Admin Guide

I’ve been reading the pages on paper (together with a highlighter :) that I printed with the help of my script below and there is lots of goodness in there.
For sure some topics are brought up without any preamble so for these I just make a note in the paper that I need to check out this other thing later.
Especially the Fibre Channel things take up quite a lot of pages. I thought in these devices FC would not be with so much focus but it seems like they do re-use a lot of the things in FC that works.

Notes and acronyms (page in NOS Admin Guide):

DCB – lossless. Able to allocate bandwidth on links.

TRILL – transparent interconnections of lots of links.

RBridge – Routing Bridge. Lowest WWN or priority.

Looks like on p54 only the text about Logical Chassis cluster config is applicable.

Trunking between VDX8770 and B8000 are not supported (B8000 is some early version of FCoE from Brocade, not visible on Brocade’s page where they list their switches)

lacp system-priority 25000 # For deciding which system is in charge of resolving LAG conflicts. (p437)

nas server-ip IP/PREFIX # Set IPs for AutoQoS for NAS (p506)

address-family ipv4 unicast # Used to enter IPv4 config in a VRF (p609)

debug lacp pdu # turn on debug (p714)

terminal monitor # view debug messages in terminal

Printing the NOS Admin Guide relevant pages:

Because the slides for the BCEFP course were insufficient I would get a lot of the basic information about the NOS from the NOS Admin Guide.
In the materials provided the NOS Admin Guide was separated into two documents. The guide is of course available in one pdf. Go to the web version and click on the pdf icon.
This makes printing based on the numbers provided easier. However the NOS Admin Guide for v4.1.1 referenced was one version below the one on the html version.

Now the numbers referenced are the numbers in the document, not the one told by the pdf viewer. So actually page 11 is page 13. Page 135 is 137. 311 is 313. 425 is 427. 517 is 519. 661 is 663. 714 is 716.
I checked a few to make sure there were no major increase due to version difference or elsewhere. One could with a bit of scripting increase each number with two like:

In a previous post I listed a some of the sources Brocade listed that one should use when studying for the BCEFP exam. Here I’m going through a those I found some comments on what what they are and what I think of them.

Beta Course Material

The first of the beta material available is something called “Brocade Ethernet Fabric Administration“. This is a few pdfs/slides with notes on them. Introduction of various features and components. Not much detail in the first 10 modules and basically all the modules are awfully short, some are one slide even. Hopefully this is just because it’s a beta. Progressively they become more detailed, which is good to not overwhelm the reader I guess. Checking out the data sheet for the CEF 300 course should give you some idea what you should learn after going through the materials. There are free materials available for the Ethernet Fabric Specialist Accreditation– it’s even on the tube. The youtube video is quite long but it’s an introduction to the thought behind the Ethernet Fabrics. It’s a bit outdated already I hope as they the talk talks about immaturity a lot, less than a year old. The presenter – Chip Copper – also mentions a Fabric Essentials 201 that should be out “later on down the line” – which is not out yet. Boo Urns!

Questions I got while reading material:

What is a hard-drop option in an extended ACL?

What does “override the control packet trap entries” mean? Brocade communities to the rescue. Is for normal transit traffic and traffic to the CPU == the management interface?